The invention relates generally to calendar-viewing systems. In particular, it relates to a calendar-viewing system in a handheld computing device which provides quick-access user activity information without switching views on a display.
Palmtops and Personal Digital Assistants, or generally handheld computing devices, are portable electronic devices intended for mobile users. Hence, these devices are designed and built to be compact and lightweight. Consequently, such devices have limited display areas for presenting information to the users. In addition, handheld computing devices have limited storage capacities. This limitation inherently affects their computational and data transfer speeds.
Since handheld computing devices are also often used as personal organizers, with which the users can take everywhere, they are typically installed with calendar-viewing programs. Calendar-viewing programs generally show arrangements of days, weeks and months in a year. For practical purposes, some calendar-viewing programs also provide user activity information to the users in the same view. User activity information includes, for example, the date, start time, description and venue of each activity. However, due to the limited display area of the handheld computing devices in which such programs are executing, the user activity information presented to the user is also limited. For example, a monthly view of a prior art calendar-viewing program in FIG. 1 defines or prescribes a period of a calendar month (October) in a calendar year (1997). The monthly view also allows only a maximum of three lines of truncated text description of the user activities to be displayed for each day. Usually, the users will not find these truncated descriptions very useful or informative if the full text descriptions are lengthy.
In order to provide users with better descriptions and more information on their activities for each day, some of these calendar-viewing programs are associated with daily activities tracking programs. Daily activities tracking programs generally provide means for users to enter and view their user activity information for a day according to predefined or user-defined time slots. In such associations, the user can launch the daily activities tracking program for a particular day by actuating an indicia (for example, the October 15 cell in FIG. 1) for that day in the calendar-viewing program. The handheld computing device display subsequently switches from the calendar view to a view of the daily activities tracking program showing the user activity information for that day.
While such calendar-viewing programs associating with daily activities tracking programs have achieved substantial commercial use, they suffer from disadvantages. A disadvantage addressed by the present invention is that in launching an associated daily activities tracking program from a calendar-viewing program, substantial computational and data transfer activities occur in the handheld computing device. Consequently, the process of switching views on the handheld computing device display becomes time-consuming. The wait for such switching of views to take effect may be undesirable to the mobile user.
Another disadvantage addressed by the invention is that the daily activities tracking programs may not present all the user activity information for a selected day in the same view. Usually, the user is required to scroll up and down the views presented by the daily activities tracking programs, due to its use of time slots, in order to gather the necessary information.
Variations of such calendar-viewing programs have been proposed and commercialized for a variety of reasons. For instance, the Calendar for Windows CE program by Microsoft Corporation provides a view of a calendar month juxtaposed to a view of a set of user activity information for a selected day within that calendar month. However, this program does not provide a user with any user activity information for each day, except for the selected day, of the calendar month. Moreover, such a program requires the user to scroll through the view of the user activity information to gather the necessary information.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a calendar-viewing system in a handheld computing device which provides quick-access user activity information of a selected period without switching views on a display.
A handheld computing device is provided with a calendar-viewing system for displaying a calendar view. The calendar view prescribes a period to a user, who is then provided with access to user activity information. During the preparation for displaying the calendar view, a set of information pertaining to such a view is read from a database in the handheld computing device. This set of calendar view information also includes a set of user activity information for the prescribed period. After displaying the calendar view to the user, the calendar-viewing system then allows the user to select a period within the prescribed period for viewing a set of user activity information for that selected period. A view of the user activity information for the selected period then replaces a portion of the calendar view. The image of that portion of the calendar view is also stored.
In a preferred embodiment of the invention, the view of the user activity information for the selected period is contiguous with an indicia of the selected period in the calendar view. In addition, this view is sized accordingly to economically fit the corresponding user activity information. Furthermore, a re-display of the image of the portion of the replaced calendar view is possible, thereby resulting in closing the view of the user activity information.
The calendar-viewing system provides a quick access to user activity information in the same view as the calendar view, thereby conveniently affording the mobile user with timely information.